Berthe Morisot’s paintings of girls are very sensitive.
The impressionist was born in 1841 to a wealthy Parisian family, to a mother (Marie-Joséphine-Cornélie Thomas) who believed in adolescent artistic training for her daughters. Joseph Guichard, an early tutor of Morisot, recognized and encouraged her talent. From an early age, she became a key member of the early impressionists, the Société Anonyme Coopérative des Artistes Peintres, Sculpteurs et Graveurs, who held the first impressionist salon in Spring 1874. She made her reputation studying domesticity and femininity; her sister Edma and daughter Julie were especially common subjects. Julie, the eponymous child in a red apron staring out of the window, was sixteen when orphaned by Morisot’s rather matronly death from pneumonia in 1895 (Julie’s father, Eugéne Manet, never reached the heights of his brother Édouard or his wife, and suffered a long illness before his own death). There’s a pretty strange Renoir of her — the lines are too refined and her face too geometric, like an ellipse, astronomical. There’s an uncanny quality to the figure — something in her blurred outline and indistinct expression that gives the scene a subtly unsettling atmosphere. She’s slightly creepy.
“Child in a Red Apron” is a relatively minor work held in the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) museum. And it is frenetic. You have to capture it all before it leaves you. Most of Morisot’s are like that; though it seems as though the motion inherent is only that of time. In 2018-19, the Barnes Foundation showed her work under the moniker “Woman Impressionist.”
As I write this, I again find myself drawn to the dog. Half-complete, confined to the corner, he seems to be the least important aspect of the image and indispensable. Perhaps I noticed it so quickly because I have a puppy just like it. Mine just turned six. He was likewise a shadow in the bottom right until he was born, and we all compromised on his name: somewhere in between a basketball player and a folk singer, we decided on a strange name for a dog. There’s a certain humor in that, surely.
But I digress. Julie is staring. She is staring at a fixed point, far off in the distance, and it is here that I emerge at a more formative point. I rub up against the impasse — one cannot write about art any longer without encountering Walter Benjamin and his “angel of history” as depicted in Paul Klee’s “Angelus Novus:” it seems as though Julie’s “face is turned towards the past” just as much as Klee’s angel. On a more personal level, perhaps, Julie does not perceive history as a singular catastrophe. But she knows — as Benjamin did, as Klee did, as we all seem to know now — that “a storm is blowing in from Paradise.” That, maybe, we are all moving forward and that there is no going back. If the angel is frozen in time for its own sake, Morisot was able to capture a singular moment and stretch it out to the size of a canvas. Benjamin, in an earlier essay, “Agesilaus Santander,” paints the angel (here only hinting to Klee) as drawing out “the strength of the man against whom he was proceeding [through time, history] — namely, his ability to wait.” And this, I believe, is the fundamental difference between the two paintings. “Child in a Red Apron” is a deeply impatient painting, despite the tranquility at the surface. It aches trying to capture it all. It is an angel of the present and bears no relation to history as such.
“The Cradle,” pictured above, is Morisot’s most famous painting — it is one animate, intimate, feminine, and impressionistic. There’s a BBC article that declares “The Cradle” (itself presented as an overlooked masterpiece by a female impressionist) “unlocks impressionism,” but I find Child In a Red Apron to be far more revealing. Also, to run the risk of excessive subjectivity and poor prose, I simply like it far more. It is, I think, a more profound statement on the relentless and futile capture of time than anything else — of Morisot’s, certainly, and, I might say, of the impressionist movement as a whole.
An example, maybe, dredged out of me from this painting:
I dearly miss home, but I’ve been calling far less frequently. I used to sit on the trash can and watch my mother braid my hair. It doesn’t really hurt anymore — or maybe the pain registers differently. I am the same person no matter where I go, and I’m learning to French braid my own now.
But I was, once, walking around the RISD museum, the Musée d’Orsay, without the chaperones needed for access in Morisot’s time. I was staring, unimpeded, at these paintings I’ve so long admired. I was in my ostentatious yellow backpack. Once or twice it felt like everything about me was garish and wrong, and everything was sad in a new way — subterranean. Ultraterranean. When I got home, I got back to my normal clothes and normal life and everything was garish and sad again, but in the right sort of way. I spent a lot of my life like that, reshaping back into myself, staring out of windows. When I was a child, the back of our couch pressed up against the windowsill. I went looking across the street, watching the cars go by and peering into the fixed point of my neighbor’s house. The television is always on! When do they go to the grocery store? I was all perched up back then. I would read in the crevice between. That was when I didn’t want anyone to look at me.
Not that true; I wanted a different sort of attention. I wondered if anyone was looking.
Now, the points are less fixed. There is more movement in the distance. I am going forward and even when stolen by illness at home for a few weeks, I knew there was no going back. Julie looks off into winter from the warmth of her home. It looks like early morning to the untrained eye (this to say that I have no idea) and brings to mind Virginia Woolf: “The birds sing in chorus; the house is whitened; the sleeper stretches; gradually all is astir. Light floods the room and drives shadow beyond shadow to where they hang in folds inscrutable. What does this central shadow hold? Something? Nothing? I do not know.”
I certainly don’t and I don’t think Morisot did either. I’m not really sure anyone does.
